Freespace Dance makes its annual appearance in West Orange

Courtesy Freespace Dance A scene from "Butt Rock," which Freespace Dance will perform in West Orange this weekend, and in Scotland later this month.

Freespace Dance will wave goodbye to friends and family this weekend, as the contemporary dance group’s concerts at the Oskar Schindler Performing Arts Center in West Orange become a bon voyage party of sorts.

These performances at the OSPAC bandshell, for an audience lounging and picnicking on the grass, are an annual highlight of the Freespace season. Company followers love the relaxed, outdoors experience, according to artistic director and choreographer Donna Scro. “Each year it’s getting bigger and bigger,” she says.

The shows promise to tingle with excitement, however, because soon afterward the Montclair-based troupe departs for a week of performances at a booking conference associated with the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland.

Scottish presenters were so thrilled with Scro’s “Butt Rock,” an athletic showcase set to music by the progressive-rock group Dream Theater, that they offered to pay the troupe’s expenses, Scro says. As a result, the OSPAC stage became the launching pad for the tour.

Scro says “Butt Rock” has been a reliable crowd pleaser ever since it entered the Freespace repertoire in 2009. “I wanted the dancers to be wild, and show off their technical skills, and just let loose after some of the headier stuff I’d been making,” she says.

In addition to “Butt Rock,” Freespace will present its calling card, a dance called “Portrait” that introduces company members as characters and illustrates their temperaments and family relationships. Scro’s “Namaste” is a sculptural duet for two women, inspired by the choreographer’s long-standing interest in yoga.

The major novelty, however, will be “From This and Before,” a dance that received its premiere earlier this year at the Montclair Art Museum. The piano score by Amanda Harberg of Glen Ridge was commissioned with a “Live Music for Dance” grant from the American Music Center.

“It’s very emotional,” says Scro, explaining that the dance for three couples represents the stages of a doomed relationship, from the innocence and simplicity of first love to the solid support and companionship of marriage, and onward to disintegration. In the last section the partners seem to go over a cliff, their careening descent leading to a smashup and flaming destruction. Scro says she based the work upon her own divorce.

As it happened, Harberg composed that final portion of the score first, and Scro says she was taken aback by the music’s tension and anger.

“She presented me with this music, and I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, this is so complicated. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to make something to this. I don’t know if my dancers are going to be able to hear it.’ It just seemed so complex.”

After studying the score, however, Scro was up for the challenge, and she enjoyed the give-and-take in the studio as the dancers and the pianist grappled with their different ways of relating to music. Ironically, the artists achieved the harmony denied to the couples in “From This and Before.”

“It’s always fascinating for me to see dancers and musicians come together,” Scro says. “That marriage is so beautiful because it’s a different language, yet it’s the same.”